


And Bring In The New

by AndreaLyn



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-17
Updated: 2012-05-17
Packaged: 2017-11-05 12:29:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Tyler rings in the New Year again and again until one year, he doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Bring In The New

1974   
  
*   
  
They ring in the year with a party that nearly decimates CID. Sam wants to know what the point of it all is, seeing as  _he’ll_  be the one cleaning it up. Gene just cuffs him upside the head and informs him to ‘shut your bloody gob, Tyler, before I shoot off a firework of New Year cheer straight up your arse’ and that’s good enough for him.   
  
He’s still there.   
  
It shocks him more than he supposes it should, that he hasn’t been whisked away back to a place that’s calling for him more insistently than before, but Sam’s grown talented at blotting out the loud barks and noises, has learned how to filter in what he wants to hear and leave out the rest. He was offered a promotion on the twenty-second of December if he’d wanted to leave the legendary Gene Hunt and resume his work as a DCI elsewhere.   
  
Sam will forever blame temporary insanity for the fact that he turned the offer down.   
  
“Ready to go?” Annie’s voice distracts him from contemplating the streamers and Ray (passed out on the ground and  _absolutely_ polluted) and the fact that it’s no longer 1973. Time has passed. Time crawls on. Sam Tyler lives in a new timeline and it’s not just going to end.   
  
*   
  
1978   
  
They miss the party that year, Sam and Annie. She’s tired of attending the parties when all the men get drunk and try to goose her and she’s moved on, besides. Bigger and better things, as Sam puts it. They don’t end up finding another party to attend and wind up spending New Year’s Eve in his shoebox of a flat with her feet in his lap and he brushes soft circles there as he watches her face and wonders if this is what she wants or if any day she’s going to realize that this is not the dream and will leave.   
  
She’s not posed to leave at that moment because she’s laughing with him about the way a male inmate had thrown himself all over Ray whilst inebriated on Bols.   
  
For one of the few times since his accident, Sam feels as though everything is in its exact right place at the right time and he feels happy without the restriction of another life bearing down on his shoulders like the weight of the world.    
  
When midnight comes, she kisses him on the lips and whispers, “I love you, Sam.”   
  
He believes her.    
  
*   
  
1979   
  
He misses the party and he’s got no excuse but a quietly broken heart to blame it on. As opposed to all the years before where he’ll share his midnight kiss with Annie, he can’t have that anymore. She calls it ‘irreconcilable differences’ and Sam just thinks it’s some long-quiet part of his brain from the future making it impossible for him to discover any form of happiness.   
  
She’d left a message on his ansaphone three weeks ago, just before Christmas and that’s where Sam is on New Year’s Eve. He’s sitting by the phone with a bottle of scotch he’s gone and stolen from Nelson.    
  
“Sam,” she says, in that soft and pleading tone. “I still want us to be friends. I just don’t think we’re going to work out so much _together_ .” A pause, a silence, an exhalation. Sam has this message memorised by now (and he ought to, being that it’s the forty-fourth time he’s heard it). “I love you, Sam. Please. Stay. Even if it’s not for me, anymore.”   
  
He goes to Gene’s home with a bottle of booze and pounds on the door until he’s answered.   
  
“Dorothy, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you look at the end of your rope,” the Guv announces as if he’s merely commenting that they ought to have mashed potatoes instead of beef that evening.   
  
Sam pushes his way into the home without an invitation, but Gene only follows him and they start in on the first bottle of Scotch of 1979.    
  
*   
  
1980   
  
They don’t get to attend any sort of party they had planned on, that year. Gene and Sam are sitting in the front seat of the Cortina with the remnants of dinner and drinks all around them and if Sam hadn’t been so damned tired all the time now (it creeps up on him and smacks him over the head with a surprise that he can be doing so poorly), he might have made a sarcastic joke about it.   
  
Instead, he keeps his eyes on the steel door in front of them. The headlights are illuminating it as bright as a Christmas angel.    
  
“I’m not waiting one more hour for this giant arsehole when there is a bottle of scotch with my name on it,” blasts Gene and honks on the horn before leaning out of the window. “Get your bloody arse out here so we can cuff you and drag you into the station to remove the very little dignity you have left!”   
  
Sam presses a palm to his face and shakes his head in abject despair. “You  _redefine_  covert, Gene,” he comments wryly and it’s not even as hopeless as it might have been seven years back. He’s used to this by now and he suspects that half of the reason Gene does it is because people expect him to.    
  
Worse, people keep validating it like this crook who slowly creeps out the steel door with hands up.   
  
“Just don’t shoot!”   
  
Gene flashes a mad grin his way and kicks out the door on his way out. “Party’s just getting started, Tyler. Get your kit on and let’s go!”   
  
*   
  
1981   
  
…it ends.   
  
It has to end, doesn’t it, and it ends so simply and quietly and without any fireworks or bangs, no inability to breathe. For all his practice in tuning out the lesser-wanted things in life, Sam can’t seem to help the fact that he’s sitting in the Cortina and the radio is dead static but for a heartbeat that’s growing weaker and weaker.    
  
Sam knows it’s his. It can’t possibly be anyone else’s.   
  
_It’s time, Sam,_  says a voice that might be his Mum’s or his own or a doctor’s or maybe even Annie or God. Maybe it’s all of them and maybe it’s none. “It’s long past time that you come back to us.”   
  
Funny. On a New Year’s that had seemed like the start of a promising year, 1981 has turned out to be something else.    
  
_It’s time, Sam. It’s time for you to leave._   
  
THE END


End file.
